Help! Ikea chair replacement castors...

[Tim Watts]

Hi,

Hmm, simple job gone wrong. I need 5 castors suitable for wood flooring (preferably polyurethane tyred). However, the chair dates back to the late 90's so the castor pin is not the modern 11x22mm type. It's parallel, groove near the free end and about (mislaied my vernier) 10mm dia by 45mm long stem.

Extensive searching on google has not yielded any UK suppliers (Caster City in the USA, but they don't ship here).

Failing that, as the chair is tubular steel, I could get new plastic sockets to suit modern castors - but again, google can't seem to find anything for "castor socket" (or even "Caster socket" for the hard of spelling!) like, say these:

pointers to a supplier of such widgetry?

BTW - WTF is google returning so many yankee sites for a google.co.uk shopping search - that's about as useful as a chocolate teapot. I've been having to add a site:*.co.uk into all my search terms - which rules out UK businesses with a .com address???

[ericp]

Seems to have happened recently when the UK only box vanished, and as you said, few US suppliers are interested in shipping here, mainly due to their postal service not being interested except for US bases.

[Anode]

"Pages from the UK" is in the left-hand column that seems to be on most Google pages now.

[Tim Watts]

Sadly that isn't on the Products page... Used to default to the UK if using google.co.uk. The rot started setting in last year IIRC, but it was only the odd thing (algorithmic errors I thought). Now it's everywhere.

I don't like the new Ajaxy pages either. Bloody slow to load on a phone in non G3 mode. Used to the the best thing about Google - simple pages. Hope they haven't started down the road to hell like those before them...

Anyway - no-one got any idea on me castors? ;->

I could throw the chair and buy a new one for 50 quid but that galls me...

[Colin Wilson]

Ikea do two different sizes of castors, so take one of your old ones in and compare - I had a similar problem recently when I wanted to replace the ones on a Procent chair as it was going onto laminate instead of carpet :-}

[PeterC]

Well, not the 'lite' mode but is UK-specific:

Anyway - no-one got any idea on me castors? ;->

I wish you wheel.

[Tim Watts]

I'll pop in next time I'm up at Wing Yip in Waddon.

I did have a look at the website and got all excited when I found these:

is excatly what I need, but the stem is wrong - that's a modern ISO-doobry fitting that *everyone* uses now for office furniture. Sadly Ikea weren't in the 90's...

[Lobster]

Either of these, maybe?:

[Tim Watts]

Thanks - good suggestions - they don't seem to have anything though.

Found my vernier. The stem is 9.6mm dia parallel (bar the groove) so it's not a variant on the 9/16" "grip neck" stem here:

would be more like 3/8" dia.

Stem length is 43mm, which is 1 3/4" near enough.

That's nearer (but not a match) to the modern "grip ring" stem which is

7/16" x 1 1/4" but with a slot in the socket rather than the stem.

I cannot find anything in the whole world that matches mine - what the hell did Ikea use? Something weird and Swedish?

Probably time to give up as a bad job :(

[Andrew May]

I have a vague recollection when I came across a similar problem that although the pin which goes into the chair is a different size the bit that goes into the wheel is the same. So, unless it is the pin that is broken you can swap it to the new wheel. But this may not be the case for yours.

Andrew

[Tim Watts]

Hmm - that *is* interesting. I shall get my vice out and see if the pin can be shifted...

[David Paste]

This company:

the castors I wanted which seemed to be rare, too. May be worth sending them an email with photos of the offending items, the guy who dealt with me at their counter seemed to know his beans, which was heartening.